Copenhell Festival

Refshaleoen

Copenhagen

Denmark

15-16/6 – 2012

Live pictures and reviewed by: Anders Sandvall

Guest contributor: Ulrika Henriksson

Here comes a review of the great Copenhell festival that took place during two slightly rainy days in the middle of June. Acts that performed included Slayer, Anthrax, Lamb Of God, Immortal, Saxon, Gojira etc.. Lets take a closer look at what the festival had to bring…..

The Copenhell Festival was held the weekend after the Sweden Rock Festival and on the same weekend as another big metal festival in Sweden, the Metaltown Festival in Gothenburg. But it didn’t seem as these festivals competed with each other because both Metaltown and Copenhell went really well as evidenced by the amount of tickets that organizers said were sold. This was the third version of Copenhell and it was, as always, held at the Refshaleoen located a few kilometers outside of downtown Copenhagen. As usual, it was possible to camp on the grounds, and new for this year was that the camping ground had increased to two grounds named Ronnie James Dio and Cliff Burton camp. This years mascot was drawn by the well known artists Derek Riggs which was pretty obvious when you see it. The bands that performed this year on the first day was Anthrax, Brutal Truth, Gojira, Meshuggah, Soulfly and the headline act for Friday was Slayer and the headline act for Saturday was Marilyn Manson.

The organizers also managed to book Mastodon who were supposed to play at the 2010 edition of the festival but were forced to cancel. With previous years, there were two stages – one called Hades and the other Helviti – but new for this year was a third stage called Pandemonium where smaller Danish acts like Barricade, Rising and Redwood Hill amongst others performed. The festival began on Thursday for the ones who lived at the campgrounds with a few Danish acts performing live. The bands on the larger Helviti stage were scheduled to play for 90 minutes and the bands on the smaller Hades stage for 60 minutes. And just as previous years, this was only the start-time for the bands announced and not closing time. This years beer tent, the Biergarten, was located in circus tent where DJ’s and karaoke took place during the two days. You could also play old school computer games like Go Go Girls and the famous photgrapher Pete Beste showed his photo exhibition True Norwegian Black Metal in a deserted building on the outskirts of the area, he also had Q&A session both days. The movie theater DOX:Hell returned this years and showed “Metal Evolution” and the documentary “God Bless Ozzy Osbourne”.